Organized by the team that brought you the legendary PHP Unconferences in Hamburg and the PHP Unconferences EU on Majorca, a conference based on the principles of learning by teaching and content-selection as you go.

On June, 21 there was the “Google NEXT” conference, 2017 edition, in the Kromhouthal in Amsterdam. Google had a dedicated ferry running to ship people over to the IJ north side, delivering directly at the Kromhouthal.

The event was well booked, about 1400 people showing up (3500 invites sent). That is somewhat over the capacity of Kromhouthal, actually, and it showed in the execution in several places (Toilet, Catering, and room capacity during keynotes).

The keynotes were the expected self-celebration, but if you substract that, they were mostly useful content about the future of K8s, about Googles Big Data offerings and about ML applications and how they work together with Big Data.

For the two talk slots before the lunch, I attended K8s talks. After lunch, I switched to the Big Data track. I did not attend any ML stuff, and I missed the last talk about Spanner because I got sucked into a longer private conversation.

Originating in London is the concept of the Tweed Run. It’s a bunch of fucking hipsters, riding outdated bikes in impractical clothing through gentrified neighborhoods flashing their privilege. Or in their own words:

The term “overdressed” does not exist in our vocabulary. Tweed suits, plus fours, bowties, and jaunty flat caps are all encouraged. […]

Dust off your vintage velocipede for the ride; prizes awarded for Best Vintage Bicycle. […]

Of course dining al fresco is an art all of its own, and we encourage you to pack a beautiful picnic basket for our Picnic Break.

A similar thing happens in the Netherlands under the label “Tweed Ride“. They are an inclusive folk, addressing both Nederlands and English speaking people. Their next event is coming Sunday, May 28th, in Breda.

Call for Papers FrOSCon 2017

The Free and Open Source Software Conference (FrOSCon), an annual summer conference for users and developers of FOSS, will be held on the August 19-20 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, Germany. It is organized by the University’s Department of Computer Science in collaboration with the student body and the FrOSCon e.V.

As its key feature, volunteer speakers will deliver a comprehensive range of talks and workshops. Additionally, the event offers space and facilities to Free Software developers and projects to organize their own meetings or subconferences. The event also hosts an exhibit hall with booths from both FLOSS projects and companies.

Right on the heels of the Openshift Commons and co-located with them, Kubecon 2017 happened at the BCC in Berlin. Supposedly 1500 people attended, which was straining BCC’s capacity to the limit, especially on the A-level. Room A03, which hosted the “Deep Dive track” was continuously overcrowded and could not accommodate all interested people.

Also, this was the most noisy event I have been attending in a long time, especially in the vendor booth setup in B01/B02. On the other hand, the hallway track was exceptionally useful, especially if one escaped out the door, weather permitting, or upstairs.

Quite a bit of content was a duplicate from the Openshift Commons Gathering preceding the Kubecon, but the inclusion of rkt and containerd as CNCF projects have been news and are very welcome.

Especially rkt will be useful, as Docker is not doing very many useful things in the context of Kubernetes and rkt kind of restricts itself to doing only these useful things and not having any other, less useful (in the K8s context) code.

At the CoreOS booth I learned that rkt is right now not yet a drop-in replacement for Docker, but may well be soon – work is being done, and quickly.

Openshift is Redhats distribution of Google Kubernetes, plus their own enhancements. It is available on your own machines as Openshift Origin (the GPL version) or OCP (Open Container Project). Redhat also operates dedicated and public clouds based on this. The Openshift Commons Gathering is a meeting of the Openshift Users Community, Commons.

Commons was a nice and fine gathering in the basement level of the BCC, a single track event with a nice mix of users reporting back their experience with Kubernetes and Openshift. In fact, Commons already had quite a bit of the content later duplicated in Kubecon, but in a smaller and less noisy setting.